BOSTON — May 1, 2018 —ownerIQ announces today that they have secured $4.6 million in additional financing from their existing investors. The company will achieve profitability in the second half of 2018 and capitalize on a major disruption in the data market.

Jay Habegger, CEO of ownerIQ, says growing mistrust of 3rd party data markets is fueling the company’s 2018 momentum. “There is a different attitude among data consumers,” says Habegger. Billions of dollars were lost to programmatic ad waste due to the lack of transparency in the inventory supply chain. The $10B U.S. data market built on opaque segments is causing deja vu and advertisers are shifting budgets to transparently sourced data.”

Transparently sourced data, or data transparency, means the advertiser or buyer has full knowledge of the source of the data behind an audience segment. This allows them to select the data that is most relevant to them and engineer segments to their needs. Since the data is transparent, advertisers can execute targeting strategies with assurances of audience accuracy. For example, running an awareness campaign against the audience of a particular lifestyle brand, or deploying a retailer-specific budget against the audience of that exact retailer.

ownerIQ enables data transparency at scale through CoEx, their award-winning data platform, and the industry’s leading second-party data marketplace. CoEx features shopping and purchasing data directly ingested from hundreds of transparent retailers and brands, which are made accessible to advertisers via permission by the data owner.

ownerIQ believes CoEx provides a blueprint that will enable the data market to continue to grow revenue as marketers have indicated that they would increase investment in data-driven strategies if the industry provides greater transparency of source. According to research, 70% of marketers said they would increase their CRM budgets if data sources were transparent, 67% said they would increase programmatic ad budgets (Source: 2017 “Data Markets Must Shift to Transparency and Choice,” Forrester Consulting commissioned by ownerIQ and Universal McCann). “Advertisers have full transparency into the audiences they are buying. Data owners have governance over usage of their asset. So CoEx is an environment that builds trust, and that will help fuel continued growth of the data market, says Habegger.”

With the new funding ownerIQ plans to meet customer demand by continuing to pursue “second-party data everywhere” strategy. The company believes marketers should have the option of using transparent data sourced directly from retailers and brands everywhere that use opaque, non-transparent data today.

In addition to the increased advertiser demand, ownerIQ is also seeing significant growth in their data partnerships. Year over year growth of retailers and brands sharing data in CoEx is up 26% and approaching 800 total partners.

About OwnerIQ
ownerIQ, or “The Q”, is focused on leading the data market’s evolution towards transparency, relevancy, and choice. We are bringing the most valuable consumer data to market– explicit shopping and purchasing data from retailers and brands– to power a new data economy: The Second-Party Data marketplace. Second-party data is sourced transparently from the marketing partners a brand is already working with or brands that share data with non-competitive brands in exchange for compensation. This new market provides better quality data inputs to power all marketing tactics and enabling fundamentally new marketing tactics, such as enabling a brand’s retail partners to leverage the brand’s data to support sell-through. ownerIQ headquartered in Boston’s Fort Point neighborhood has 6 offices across the U.S. and over 150 employees.